The present invention relates to systems and methods for computer-generated image processing in general and in particular to altering a flow of a rendering image to allow for processing of inserted graphics elements that are frame specific and represent time-aggregation of other objects.
It is well known that an animated visual presentation can be created by creating individual static images (frames). The static images, when displayed in sequence can form an animated visual presentation, such as a short sequence or a feature length film. Thus, each frame as a time at which it is to be displayed in the sequence, i.e., a “frame time”. In computer-generated imagery, the imagery to be shown can be represented by objects having shapes, textures and locations within an image and those can change over time. This representation is often referred to as the scene geometry, which can be stored in an animation database as objects and animation information describing how the objects move. For example, the animation database might include a sphere, an indication of a texture to be applied.
A rendering engine can then use this animation to “render” images, i.e., determine the colors of pixels in a pixel array that collectively represents an image and do this for a sequence of images to form an animation sequence. When displayed, this presents to the user imagery of the objects moving through a scene. Of course, typically an animation sequence is more complicated than just a sphere, as it may have millions of objects, some moving and some not. In effect, a 3D rendering engine reads the animation database, determines the location in a virtual 3D space of a camera viewpoint and a camera view port (such as a rectangle representing the view of the virtual 3D space visible from the camera), what objects are visible within that view port and what color contribution objects make to the pixel color for the pixels of the image that are mapped to points of the view port.
The fields of rendering and generating scene geometry to represent an artist's view for an animation sequence are well established and since the rendering process and scene representation by collections of virtual objects are well-known, they need not be described here in detail for an understanding of the concepts presented herein.